


“Etté Zirach, Sixth Handmaiden in the Third Class for Padmé Amidala”

by Polgarawolf



Series: Star Wars: You Became to Me [22]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Handmaidens, Injury, Injury-related illness, Injury-related physical disability, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), POV Original Character, Prisoner of War, Sacrificial ethics, Torture, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-21
Updated: 2007-10-21
Packaged: 2017-11-13 08:47:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/501650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polgarawolf/pseuds/Polgarawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is fifteen random but chronological moments from the life of Etté Zirach, who is, quite literally, the sixth handmaiden in the third training class of potential handmaidens chosen from among a large pool of applicants for the job for the newly elected Nabooian Queen Padmé Amidala. There is an actual story here – one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together – but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )</p>
            </blockquote>





	“Etté Zirach, Sixth Handmaiden in the Third Class for Padmé Amidala”

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning:** This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Etté Zirach’s life, as she is going to be written (or at least referred to) in my not even nearly complete AU **Star Wars** series **_You Became to Me_**. If anything doesn’t make sense, please feel free to ask!
> 
>  **Author’s Notes: 1.)** Again, for anyone interested, this not-quite-a-story is compatible with my SW AU series **_You Became to Me_** , including my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, if you squint at a couple of things sideways and view a few others solely through the lens of Etté Zirach’s eyes. **2.)** Although this is technically modeled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere or another on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where anymore, precisely, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info for the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to whatever the challenge actually is that’s associated with said LJ prompt set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Etté. **3.)** Readers might want to consider the fact that Etté, like a lot of native Nabooians, is fairly strong in the Force, but that she hasn’t received any training whatsoever to speak of and so has no real conscious control over that sensitivity to the Force. **4.)** Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for original characters like Etté should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! For clarity’s sake, though, Etté is modeled on a teenaged (and brunette!) Benedetta Valanzano, Lehari Nhaven can be pictured as a young (not quite eleven and a half, at the time of the Trade Federation’s invasion of Naboo) Ava Gardner. Please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of original characters, for example) are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! **5.)** Handmaidens often tend to pair off, as is the case here, with Etté Zirach and Aideé Gardia, a fellow handmaiden from the same training class (hence, the relationship label for original female characters and the underage warning). **6.)** Speaking of pairings, I've labeled this to indicate both Padmé Amidala's and Sabé's love for Obi-Wan, because, even though it may not be specifically mentioned in this character study piece, handmaid(en)s know so much about their sworn Lady that readers can be certain that Etté, like all of Amidala's other handmaid(en)s who knew him (or knew of him), would have surely known about both their Lady's and Sabé's love and high regard for Obi-Wan, just as they would have known about how much Amidala and Sabé love one another!
> 
>  **Story Notes:** **1.)** Since this is part of a larger on-going AU series that in some respects fairly closely mirrors or follows events of canon (up to a certain point, anyway), readers should please keep in mind that certain characters and events from the prequel movies/novelizations of the films and even events/places/people referenced in the EU or Expanded Universe may be mentioned or alluded to in this story. If anyone has any questions about whether someone or something is AU, canon, or EU canon, please feel free to ask! **2.)** Readers should probably be aware that I am roughly estimating (guestimating might be a better word) the original publication date for most of the character study pieces in the **_You Became to Me_** series (and indeed most of my stories, especially the ones written over a long period of time), based on when I roughed out notes for them in the story notebooks I carry everywhere with me and when I can recall having worked on certain groups of characters. The year is going to be accurate, but the month might be off and the day will almost certainly be randomly chosen, since the online account I had originally posted many of these stories to no longer exists. I tend to go back and edit things that are in series whenever I get the time or a new idea causes me to have to make room for something else plot-wise, and odds are good that a story could have been edited for typos as recently as the day of its posting here, but the original version will likely be much older and fairly close to the publication date that I attach to it, if anyone's curious!

**“Etté Zirach, Sixth Handmaiden in the Third Class for Padmé Amidala”**

 

 **01.) Family:** She is one of the few true foundlings of Naboo, taken at birth (or perhaps just after, according to the Healer who examined her soon after she was found and who went on to become her private family Healer) and literally left on the doorstep of a somewhat minor (if well-heeled) noble family in Theed with nothing but a basket and blanket pinned with a note containing her name and the legend “half Corellian” on it, and, though the family felt obliged to take her in and she has never wanted for any worldly goods, she has also never felt truly completely welcome or at home in the Nhaven household, either, and so she is extremely glad when a chance finally comes for her to get out of there that does not involve either selling herself into marriage with some brainless dolt of a younger son of some “suitable” noble family (which is, as she has constantly been told, as high a station as she dare aspire to, in life) or else running away like some ridiculous teenaged heroine in a romance novel. 

**02.) Prospects:** The Nhavens do their best to keep her from applying for the position (as they aren’t quite sure that they approve of this passionately outspoken new Queen or of the propriety of having a noble daughter – even a foundling such as herself – serving as a handmaiden for a girl from a family that apparently used to farm their own vegetables, up in the mountains), but she wears them down by pointing out how much better her prospects might be, after serving in the royal court, and they finally give her permission to apply after wrangling a promise out of her to be on the watch for any suitors suitable for her youngest, as yet unpromised and unmarried (being not quite eleven and a half) foster sister, Lehari Nhaven, and to send word to them about any such eligible bachelors and even to do her best to arrange a meeting with the family for any prospective matches she and Mother might deem to be a truly wonderful potential catch.

 **03.) Hesitate:** Lehari (who is as close to her as a real sister and quite nearly as rebellious and unhappy in the family as she is) truly is the only one she will miss at all, and, because Etté knows her own worth and knows that she is meant for more and for better than the end that her so-called family has in mind for her, she doesn’t hesitate for very long before submitting her application for the handmaiden training program, soothing her conscience by promising herself she will figure out some way to get her little sister safely away from that family that doesn’t involve simply letting their mother marry Lehari off to the highest, most properly connected bidder.

 **04.) Dangerous:** She looks rather as if someone took a model of the Queen, stretched her out just a little bit, painted her skin a light, dusky caramel, made her curves a bit more obviously voluptuous, and then breathed life into her, and Etté knows that this will make her more likely to be called upon for the more dangerous decoy duties than others of the handmaidens are likely to be, but she is brave, and she knows that she is clever enough and quick enough to be able to defend herself ably, if only given a chance, so she doesn’t mind the possibility of extra danger too terribly much, and hopes only that she will be able to acquit herself well, if called upon to protect the Queen in such a way.

 **05.) Accepted:** She’s missed the cut-off date for the first two training classes and is cutting it close to that of the third, so she’s not too surprised or disappointed to find herself accepted into the second half of the third handmaiden training class.

 **06.) Magnificence:** The Queen is . . . she is . . . words absolutely fail to describe her magnificence, and the thought that this is someone she can adore with her whole being and feel worthy of dying for is one that she unabashedly holds close to her heart, her slightly stunned comfort and joy at finding her newly sworn lady to be such a worthy mistress making her feel so light-headed as to nearly feel drunk with relief. 

**07.) Home:** She’s never thought of herself as the kind of foolish creature prone to inexplicable crushes, and yet, in the day and a half she is at the Palace, waiting for her training class to finish gathering so that they can be taken to their place of instruction, she finds herself all but falling in love with three separate people, and it’s a little bit disconcerting to realize how easily and how happily she could make herself a permanent home here, so long as she has her sworn lady and Dormé and Aideé all close by her.

 **08.) Survive:** She is intelligent, an accomplished dancer, a graceful rider of gualamas able to successfully fly a twirrl on even the roughest of twirrling hunts and even capable of hitting and taking down a waterfowl on the wing with a single shot from either a blaster or an old-fashioned pistol nine times out of ten; yet, she lacks the endurance and physical discipline that Dormé and Aideé have in spades, and, if it were not for Dormé’s careful encouragement and Aideé’s open admiration of her perseverance, she is not at all sure that she would be able to survive this punishingly hard crash course in defensive and offensive weaponry and tactics.

 **09.) Safety:** She doesn’t need to be sensitive to the flows of the Force to know that some kind of awful confrontation between the Trade Federation and her planet is brewing, and so she quiets her conscience by getting the Nhaven family out of Theed and into the country – supposedly for a vacation at one of the Barakis family summer villas (an arrangement she and Aideé managed to set up, between the two of them, with a bit of help from her foster sister, Lehari, and from Aideé’s brother, Kason), but in actuality to get them somewhere they will be able to safely hide – thus killing two birds with one stone, by providing her foster family with a place of safety, in case the Trade Federation does something unconscionably stupid (like attacking the planet), and by giving her little sister a way out of her family and into a clan that will allow her to be herself, whether she wishes to join the Barakis family by impressing them enough to get them to issue her a formal invitation of fosterage among them (something that will not be difficult to arrange, given how well Lehari already seems to get along with Aideé’s adoptive family) or by eventually handfasting that wonderfully funny and smart young Kason (who can make Lehari laugh like no one else she has ever known).

 **10.) Back:** She was at the Palace for just over a day and a half before they left for Varykino, arriving early in the evening, and they are there for not much longer, really, having five full days of training before being abruptly told (at breakfast on the sixth day) that they are going back to the Palace and will be departing at the tenth hour.

 **11.) Doom:** She knows something is wrong even before the alarms begin to blare, and that sickening sense of impending doom swells and _swells_ and _**swells**_ until it finally explodes with a direct collision with a blaster bolt that she keeps from hitting Dormé only by deliberately placing herself between the girl and the traitor wielding the weapon.

 **12.) Sensation:** She surfaces from darkness slowly, to the strange sensation of feeling no physical pain but of having a strangely bitter medicinal taste coating the whole of her throat and tongue, to find that twenty-seven days have passed since her wounding (and that there were those who thought she would die of either fever or sepsis, no matter how much bacta they used on her, after getting her out of the cell where she’s apparently been left to die), Aideé has been slain, the Queen has outsmarted and defeated the Trade Federation (droid armies and all), Sabé Dahn has been appointed interim Senator (not only for Naboo but the whole of the Chommell Sector) in Palpatine’s place due to Amidala instigating a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum and Palpatine being elected Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic in his stead and the people of Naboo uniting behind a rather righteously indignant Horace Vancil to unilaterally vote to refuse to allow the patently prejudiced against non-humans Janus Greejatus of Chommell Minor to represent them in the Galactic Senate, Dormé has been made the Queen’s new primary decoy (specifically chosen for this duty by Sabé), and that she (Etté, that is) will likely never regain the full use of her left arm again because her wound was too deep and left so long virtually untreated that there was irreparable muscle loss and damage.

 **13.) Reassignment:** The Queen would retire her “honorably” if Etté would let her, but Etté will not hear of it, half useless left arm or not, and it is Sabé who finally arrives at a compromise they can all live with, inviting Etté to accept an invitation for reassignment to the ranks of instructors for the new handmaidens as a combination teacher of riding, dancing, and protocol.

 **14.) Retire:** The Nhaven family wants her to retire so that she can parlay her notoriety as a loyal handmaiden wounded during the occupation of Naboo into a good marriage, and she is so incredibly insulted by the notion that she finally loses her temper and threatens to sever all ties with them, if they don’t drop the subject of marriage immediately and for good and simply accept the fact that she has no interest in abandoning her Queen.

 **15.) Deadly:** The Nhavens don’t have to live long with the social stigma of having a partially crippled daughter working for the Queen: a year, seven months, and ten days after her acceptance of the teaching post, she stumbles upon one of the newest handmaiden trainees as she’s trying to poison the Lake House Retreat’s main water supply, and, though she is quick to act and as deadly a shot as ever, it cannot quite save her from being mortally wounded by a foe prepared to act with deadly force when she is not particularly expecting to have to deal with any such threat.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Clarification Note:** One of the reasons why my AU **Star Wars** series _**You Became to Me**_ is so entirely not even nearly complete has to do with the fact that I really started writing at the wrong end of the prequel trilogy for an AU (in my defense, though, when I started what became my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, which is over a million words long, I thought I was doing a sort of one-shot fix-it based on an idea I got for "fixing" RotS by changing something that happens very near the end of James Luceno's EU novel _Labyrinth of Evil_ , which is set immediately prior to RotS). One of these days, I fully intend to rectify that problem by going back and starting from the beginning, with an AU rewrite of TPM, which is why I took the time to do a character study sketch for a supporting character like Etté. She'll be showing up again, in a more prominent role, whenever I get around to that AU rewrite of TPM. Folks might want to keep that in mind when reading this, since technically this is spoilerish for an AU novel that I haven't gotten around to writing yet!


End file.
